After All the Changes

By Aisha Marie

Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets, the moon sets, but they are not gone.

~ Rumi

Mom and I didn’t have the closest of relationships. At least, it seemed that way to me when I was young. I felt terribly isolated, and terribly lonely.

I was only eleven when my father passed away. I was beyond heartbroken. I was crushed. But even before my father had died, he and my mother had already divorced. My mother, Barbara, remarried, and she and I went to live with my stepfather, Earl. The change was massive. One day I was living in a little house near Canyon—about a mile before the weigh station at the foot of Fourth of July Pass—with my father, my mother, my sister and my brother, a dog, two ponies, a cow whose back I would nap on, and a dozen or more chickens. There were meadows to wander in and mountains to climb. Seemingly the next day I was in a tiny apartment to the southeast in Cataldo. At ten years old, I didn’t even realize there were words—sad, confused, lonely—to describe what I was feeling.

But this isn’t a story of regrets.